When managing employees, it can be useful as a manager or HR department to understand Transformative Learning Theory because it can help us understand how to build a culture of resilience in the workplace.
Change these days in the workplace is often fluid in that things often change quickly (such as technology and job roles) and stress levels rise as the demands to adapt continually occur.
For employees to succeed in the workplace these days, in addition to strong job skills, having strong resilience skills is extremely useful, and a great way to build resilience is through transformative learning.
As I will discuss below, reflection, adaptability, and personal growth are all aspects of transformative learning theory, and these skills all help employees to navigate change and new challenges with confidence. Furthermore, it benefits the company.
What Is Transformative Learning Theory?
Transformative Learning theory was first developed by educator Jack Mezirow, and it is a theory that focuses on the deep changes you can experience as an individual when you critically reflect on your personal beliefs, assumptions, and experiences.
In other words, rather than seeking to learn new things and gain new knowledge, it is about how we reshape our way of thinking and see the world, by using the 4 stages of the theory:
- Disorienting Dilemmas
- Critical Self-Reflection
- Rational Discourse
- Personal agency
I will explain each of the 4 stages later in this post but for now, suffice to say that a key element of the theory is the ‘Critical self-reflection’ stage because this is the stage in which we challenge and question our assumptions and attempt to critically reflect on our experiences, in order to grow through being willing to adapt and learn for future challenges.
Benefits of Using Transformative Learning Theory in the Workplace
Transformative learning is certainly a theory worth using for workplace training because it can help us improve adaptability, creativity, and resilience skills for employees and managers alike.
Adaptability
As touched on earlier, change in the workplace these days happens so quickly such as with new IT systems being used, processes changing, etc.
In a work environment of constant change, the ability to adapt well is an extremely handy skill for employees to have, in order to thrive and succeed.
Transformative learning helps employees move beyond fear or resistance to change by encouraging them to view it as an opportunity for growth.
(See the adaptability teaching materials if you are interested in learning more about teaching adaptability skills).
Innovation and Creativity
Transformative Learning also helps us as managers or employees to challenge existing workplace beliefs and assumptions through creative thinking and coming up with innovative and new ideas.
Resilience
Resilience is our ability in the workplace to deal with setbacks and stressful and difficult situations while remaining in control, strong, and able to thrive.
Transformative learning is a handy tool for helping employees to develop this resilience as you will see from the 4 stages of the transformative learning theory, as detailed below.
4 Stages of Transformative Learning Theory
The 4 stages of Transformative Learning Theory involve us experiencing a dilemma that is challenging and that we need to work through, using reflection, and finding a new positive perspective as explained below:
1. Disorienting Dilemma
An individual experiences a significant challenge (dilemma) and this situation leads us to challenge our own beliefs and/or assumptions.
Referred to as the “disorienting dilemma” stage, the situation in question might be some kind of work crisis, something you see as a big failure, or some moment of confusion that forces you to question and confront your own way of seeing the world.
2. Critical Reflection
Once the dilemma has taken place, the person involved will then critically self-reflect.
In other words, they are likely to consider and re-examine their own beliefs, values, and their own assumptions, because of this new experience.
This reflection involves asking why they held certain views and whether those views are still valid.
3. Rational Discourse
The idea in this stage is for individuals (employees in this case) to openly discuss the challenge/dilemma with others and to try and elicit new ideas and understanding through sharing experiences and critically discussing the situation with others, i.e. colleagues.
Part of this outreach in the rational discourse stage can include seeking extra training to try and relearn things to understand why you got things wrong in the first place.
Overall, the intention is to build a deeper understanding and perspective that will serve you better moving forward.
4. Personal Agency
Having openly discussed the dilemma in stage 3, in this stage, it is about turning this new perspective into new behavior, work attitudes, and using this new worldview, for personal growth.
You take control and move forward!
Together, these four steps help the individual develop to be into a more resilient and adaptable individual as they become empowered through taking personal agency, in their own learning and development.
Transformative Learning Examples
To give you two examples of transformative learning theory in practice, here are two real-world examples:
Example Number 1
Petra works for an airline in an Australian international airport and she is a customer service agent who keeps facing a disorienting dilemma whereby she is repeatedly encountering frustrated passengers due to flight delays.
Initially, she felt overwhelmed, overstressed, and was getting very defensive but she engaged in critical self-reflection and focused on her own communication style and how she would always react during stressful situations.
After attending conflict resolution training and discussing various strategies with her peers and a training manager, Petra developed a new perspective on how best to manage passenger issues without taking it personally and becoming stressed herself.
Petra integrated the new way of thinking and the skills she learned in the conflict resolution training to transform her way of dealing with customers.
She now remains empathetic and focuses on trying to help the customer find the best solution. She is now happy in her work and has actually become the best-performing customer service agent according to passenger feedback scorecards.
Example Number 2
Imagine that Bob is a marketing manager and he has spent a large budget on paid advertising and it has proven to be a failure, in that it has generated very few leads and used up much-needed budget.
Despite the self-doubt, Bob used resilience and transformative learning by focusing on what went wrong and reflecting on his decisions and the outcomes.
He was also willing to open up to others and ask for their advice.
He also, of his own choosing, went on a 2-day training course for advanced training and it helped him understand some of the reasons as to where he was going wrong.
Bob rethought his whole approach and emerged with a new strategy that the next time did actually prove successful.
Bob took a problem-solving approach to the initial failure and acted with resilience rather than allowing the initial issue to affect future performance. He wasn’t afraid to self-reflect, seek others’ help, and focus on the solution and way forward.
In this workplace example, what might otherwise be considered a negative situation, Bob turned into a positive outcome and continued striving forward.
Practical Strategies for Implementing Transformative Learning at Work
Integrating transformative learning into the workplace really does not have to be difficult. Here are some practical strategies to use if you are an HR department, training facilitator, or team manager:
- Workshops and Reflective Practices: If you are a manager or training facilitator, make use of training activities that encourage critical reflection, such as by using journaling exercises. This will give the employees you are training the chance to process their experiences and develop new perspectives (such as the emotions journaling activity).
- Mentorship and Coaching: Mentorship and transformative learning work well together, as the mentors can help employees reflect on the challenges the employee is experiencing, and can encourage the employee to start thinking critically about their career goals.
- Encourage a Growth Mindset: Encouraging employees to try and develop a growth mindset, so that they see any challenges as opportunities and develop new skills through any setbacks, can be helped through using transformative learning. Using feedback loops, and showing recognition when employees show adaptability and growth also helps.
Final Thoughts
Transformative learning is an extremely useful theory and tool that can applied to the workplace to help employees develop resilience, adaptability, and innovation-related skills and work practices.
As a leader, make sure to encourage employees to be open to critical reflection, embrace challenges as opportunities for growth, and try to empower employees to take control of their own development.
As a leader though you might want to consider offering workshops on how to build resilience and to make it easy for you, you can download the teaching and training materials and easily run a short workshop on resilience – see the materials below:
>> Resilience PowerPoint Slides for Teaching
Paul is Co-Founder of Symonds Research and is a qualified researcher with a PhD in wayfinding. Paul helps the team at Symonds Research build and focus on providing high-quality training materials packages and programs for trainers, classroom teachers and HR departments.